His "Repentance," and his "Groatsworth of Wit" (1592), with the notorious allusion to "Shake-scene" were among his last efforts. The "Groatsworth of Wit" describes the jealousies between the playwrights and the actors, who, then as always, gained most of the popularity, and then gained most of the money yielded by the stage. It is almost impossible for unbiased readers to avoid detecting in Greene's "Johannes Factotum," "the only Shake-scene in the country," an allusion to Shakespeare. Whether he partook too freely of pickled herrings and Rhine wine, as gossip averred, or not, he fell into a fatal illness, and died in debt to his landlord and landlady, in September, 1592. Harvey attacked and Nash defended his memory, but, even according to Nash he was a "ruffler". "Penning of plays," Greene says, was his "continual exercise," but at what date he began it is uncertain. He appears to have been stung by some comment in a play by two other authors on the unfashionable character of his own dramas, "for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins"; that is, apparently, he did not try to write the sonorous blank verse of Marlowe; or tried and failed to produce in Nash's words "the swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse". If "Alphonsus, King of Arragon" be his first play, as it gives Tamburlaine on a small scale it may have been suggested by Marlowe's drama: however Alphonsus, after Napoleonic victories, marries his own true love, the daughter of the Sultan and Greene's play, like the tragedies preferred by Charles II, "ends happily". The blank verse is inferior to that of the Ninevite play in which Lodge took part, "A Looking Glass for London and England". "Orlando Furioso" is a strange medley; there is prose, blank verse, and even a speech in Latin: the materials are drawn, of course, from Ariosto; the Paladins deal enormously in classical allusions. In "Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay," the Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward I, falls in love with a gamekeeper's daughter, and describes her charms in blank verse, and in a very pretty pastoral manner. By the old trick of novels and of the stage he sends Lacie, a courtier, to woo for him (as in "Much Ado about Nothing," "Twelfth Night," and "Two Gentlemen of Verona"), and the usual consequences follow. The Friars Bacon and Bungay are shown at their pranks, with a devil, and Lacie, "in country apparel," flirts with the keeper's daughter in talk of Apollo's courtship of Semele (mother of Dionysus by Zeus). The king beholds their courtship by dint of crystal-gazing; while they are also on the stage. The plot becomes extremely complicated, and poor Margaret, the keeper's daughter, has to play the patient Grizel to Lacie. She is cruelly treated, but marries Lacie in the end, while Edward pairs off with Eleanor. The servant of Friar Bacon, Miles, and a devil provide some comic matter. The blank verse is now much more accomplished, and imitates the cadences of Marlowe.